County jails, one by one: major discipline at New Jersey's fourteen county corrections departments

Fifteen corrections agencies appear in New Jersey's major discipline data. One is the state Department of Corrections, which runs the prisons and reported 577 records from 2020 to 2025, more than any agency of any kind.^[1] The other fourteen are county jails, run by county governments, and together they reported 742.^[1]

The state department gets written about. The county jails mostly do not, partly because their records are spread across fourteen pages and partly because they sit in a category most readers skip past on the way to the police. This piece goes through them one at a time, largest to smallest, with the figures each reported.

The two that carry most of it

Camden County Corrections reported 333 records over the six years, 6 of them terminations.^[1] That is 45 percent of everything the fourteen county jails reported combined, and it is the reason Camden County leads the state in major discipline records overall. In 2025 alone the jail reported 112 records, more than any police department in New Jersey.^[1] On the internal affairs side it reported 186 investigations for 2025, naming 110 officers.^[2] A termination share under 2 percent, against a statewide share near 16, says that the jail's discipline is almost entirely suspensions.

Atlantic County Corrections reported 127 records, 3 of them terminations, with 33 in 2025.^[1] Its internal affairs figures are strikingly small beside that: 16 investigations for 2025, naming 12 officers.^[2] A jail that reports 33 final discipline actions in a year and 16 investigations is reporting the two halves of the process on different scales, which is possible when discipline lags investigations by a year or more, and which is worth noticing all the same.

The middle six

Essex County Corrections reported 62 records, and 25 of them were terminations, the highest count of firings at any county jail and a share of 40 percent.^[1] It reported 164 investigations for 2025, naming 135 officers, and it appears on the Attorney General's non-reporting list for 2023.^[2]

Burlington County Corrections reported 52 records with 4 terminations, and 23 investigations for 2025.^[1][2] Monmouth County Corrections reported 47 records with 1 termination, and 17 investigations.^[1][2] Hudson County Corrections reported 38 records with 5 terminations, and 96 investigations naming 78 officers.^[1][2]

Middlesex County Corrections is the other jail where termination is common: 17 of its 36 records, nearly half.^[1] It reported 42 investigations for 2025.^[2] Salem County Correctional Facility reported 14 records with 2 terminations and no internal affairs figures at all for 2025; it is the one corrections agency the site cannot grade, for want of data.^[1][2]

The six with few records

Morris County Corrections reported 11 records, 6 of them terminations, and 40 investigations for 2025.^[1][2] Cumberland reported 10 with 4 terminations and 20 investigations.^[1][2] Ocean reported 6 records and no terminations, with 37 investigations.^[1][2] Somerset reported 5 and 6 investigations; Warren reported 1, a termination, and 3 investigations.^[1][2] Cape May County Correctional Center reported no major discipline at all across the six years and no internal affairs figures for 2025.^[1][2]

Several counties have no jail in the data because they no longer run one. Counties that closed their facilities and send detainees to a neighboring county's jail under a shared-services agreement have no corrections agency to report, and their absence from this list is a fact about county government rather than about discipline.

Why they are only compared with each other

The obvious next step, dividing each jail's records by its number of officers to get a rate, is not available. The FBI's staffing census carries one row for the state Department of Corrections and none for any county facility, so the site has no sworn headcount for a single county jail.^[3] The Attorney General's "officers" column is not a headcount either; it counts officers named in that year's investigations.^[2]

That is why every jail on this site is graded and ranked only against the other corrections agencies, on a peer basis that uses the officers-named column as the best available scale, and why each card says so. It is also why the raw counts above should be read with the size of the facility in mind: a county with a large jail will report more of everything. Camden's jail is one of the state's largest; Warren's is small.

What the numbers can say

They can say that county jail discipline is concentrated, with two facilities holding well over half of it. They can say that the mix of suspension and termination varies enormously, from under 2 percent terminations at Camden to nearly half at Middlesex, in ways a record count alone hides. And they can say that a few jails report internal affairs figures out of proportion to their discipline, in both directions, which is a reason to read both sections of a department's page rather than one.

What they cannot say is how often a corrections officer crosses a line, because no denominator for that exists in any public file. Every figure here is a count of what the agency reported, cited to its row, and left for the reader to weigh. The corrections overview puts the county jails beside the state department; the rankings by agency type let a reader compare them on the measures the data supports.